Vaccine Megathread No 2 - Read OP before posting

zebastein

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117824515#Comment_117824515

The 18-24yo have been able to take the vaccine in France for ~3months, vs. ~1month in Ireland.

The 18-24yo have to do a PCR test everytime they want to take a long distance train/ go to a sport or music event in France if they are not vaccinated, which is not the case in Ireland. That pushes some people to go get the jab earlier than if the vaccine does not change your daily routine.

We know it is an age group difficult to interest and to move. We'll see what will be announced today but I bet that if concerts/festivals come back for vaccinated people, that will push young people to the vaccination centres

crossman47

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117822546#Comment_117822546

Scepticism based on unsupported evidence can be dangerous. Look at what happened to the MMR vaccine take up after that infamous "study". It led to many deaths.

Toodles_27

Anyone tell me roughly how long from registering a 12yr to getting appt for vaccination?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117826360#Comment_117826360

The reason being that in France they were able to start the younger group earlier because of the poorer take-up in the older age groups

robinbird

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117826650#Comment_117826650

Exactly this. Our vaccine rollout was significantly slower than France and most other EU countries so it has been available to tgat cohort there for months longer than here. Irish and much more compliant that the French. Epect us to be ahead on this metric soon enough..

bennyineire

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117827516#Comment_117827516

It hasn't been slower, it's matched and exceeded most EU countries. We done it different here than most by doing it oldest first. You constantly post un factual stuff on this thread. A few months ago you said Irelands vaccination effort was hopeless and we had no hope of even getting 70% done by the end of August.

Ireland is ahead of France in overall population % vaccinated and has been practically all the time since it started

What say you know about Irelands vaccine program?

Furze99

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117827386#Comment_117827386

Sure, but there is a middle ground which is best summed up by the old mantra 'don't believe everything you hear or read'.

is_that_so

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117827480#Comment_117827480

Shouldn't be that long given that 164,000 have been registered and 148,000 have already got the first shot. That total will add just over 3% to the proportion of the population fully vaccinated so we could end up at 80%.

Toodles_27

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117828343#Comment_117828343

Thanks. Registered Saturday and haven’t heard anything yet. Hopefully soon.

robinbird

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117827574#Comment_117827574

A bit of revisionism going on in that post which needs to be called out. At the end of June we were dead last in western Europe in terms of vaccine rollout with over a million vaccines in storage. When other EU countries were on over 18s we were still on over 35s with same pro rata supply.

People like you had fallen for the false narrative that we were doing a wonderful job and were only restricted by supply. You claimed we could only ramp up with the arrival of the mythical million extra Romanian vaccines. They never came but there was a change in strategy. Pharmacies were brought on board and we ramped up to 350,000 a week. The inadequate supply narrative was quietly forgotten and we were able to catch up to the rest of EU by end of July and because of compliance in Ireland exceed most countries. August has mostly been 16-17s and 150,000 kids.

The Romanian vaccines eventually arrived as we were finishing up and had no need for them and the false claims that you were making at end of June that we couldn't increase rollout wirhout them has been quietly forgotten..

The poster above in correct. The reason we are behind France in 18-24s is largely because vaccines have been available to tgat cohort there for much longer.

xboxdad

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117831140#Comment_117831140

"When other EU countries were on over 18s we were still on over 35s with same pro rata supply"

I believe I read it here multiple times that it was a typical tactic in some countries to offer the vaccines to "all" age groups when they found there was not a lot of demand in older age groups to use up their supply of vaccines. If that's true, there's nothing suspicious about us being on over 35s when other countries were on over 18s I assume.

Lumen

It's never been properly explained how Paul Reid was repeatedly stating that 95% of vaccines went into arms within a week of delivery whilst the ECDC portal was showing delivered-administered>=half a million doses, at times when we were administering well under half a million doses a week and our number of doses administered per capita was below many other EU countries.

In the end it hasn't made a great deal of difference (we were only behind the best by a week or so) but the lack of probing from journalists was disappointing, and I find shut-up-and-put-on-the-green-jersey flavoured defences of our vaccination programme a bit grating as a response.

That said, obviously criticising the programme solely because France or wherever was vaccinating younger people at any given date is nonsense.

The determination of some people to force everything in the world into two boxes marked "wonderful" and "sh!t" never ceases to amaze me.

robinbird

The vaccine program in general was quite successful and we did change tack in early July to ramp up significantly although fear of Delta seems to be have the impetus.

What I found grating was the putting on the green jersey and the self congratulation in June when we were clearly behind the rest of the EU in our rollout. And the unquestioning acceptance from media and some here that this was due to "supply issues" when it was instead due to insufficient capacity and we had significant unused stocks in storage.

And the Romanian vaccine narrative that was simply a cynical tactic that so many were conned by is a scandal. These were never needed and are now sitting in storage unused. Instead they could and should have gone to poorer countries elsewhere.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117831410#Comment_117831410

This stuff is very easy to verify

robinbird

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117831459#Comment_117831459

You can selectively use statistics to show whatever you want. There is significant vaccine hesitancy in many eastern European EU countries which brings the average down.

Perhaps you can find the chart that shows that we were last in western Europe in early July at the same time that posters here we're crowing about how wonderfully we were doing.

bennyineire

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117831140#Comment_117831140

I guess you know better than Our World in Data so because your "stats" don't hold up at all, one might even think you made them up.

robinbird

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117831507#Comment_117831507

Thanks for proving my point. Follow the line and that graph shows that we were the worst performing country in western Europe in June in terms of vaccine rollout as well as being below EU average which includes vaccine hesitant eastern European countries. We only caught up after we ramped up in July.

bennyineire

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117831544#Comment_117831544

Miniscule difference mate, practically identical 😂 and now we are ahead of France. Do you take any pleasure in life?

bennyineire

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117831544#Comment_117831544

Here is the difference between Ireland and France, in fact we have been ahead of them for over 95% of the time by this chart

robinbird

France is notoriously vaccine hesitant and struggled to persuade their population to take it so that is why you chose it.

It is the only western European country we were even close to in June. We were well behind all the others.

How about that chart with Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Getmany, Iceland,Malta, Portugal Holland etc included. I dare you. And then tell me again how the self congratulatory bombast about how wonderful we were doing in June was justified.

bennyineire

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117831613#Comment_117831613

I choose France because you were the very one comparing Ireland to France yesterday 🤣, a quote from you "Exactly this. Our vaccine rollout was significantly slower than France"

robinbird

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117831627#Comment_117831627

Quoting out of context. Another poster brought up how vaccine hesitant France had a higher uptake in 18-24 yr olds than Ireland. I was responding to that particular point and providing a possible explanation..

astrofool

The only issue in the system was the HSE IT hack and blackout that caused reporting to be delayed.

We always got 95% of vaccines into arms within a week when we were supply constrained and we ramped up vaccinations to match the supply we got.

To say otherwise, doesn't match the data and is disingenuous.

We had posters each week crying about how awful we were and when the data was published, we were always on target with the vaccine rollout vs. delivery.

Where we missed was in getting the extra supply early on from countries not taking their full allocation (like Denmark did) which allowed them a faster rollout, but those were in the heady days when AZ was going to be the main vaccine to power the EU through the pandemic.

muddypuppy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117831613#Comment_117831613

Yes, there was a point where we reported less vaccines per 100 people around the end of June/July. It probably was caused by the HSE hack and us not properly reporting any data at that time.

As you can see all countries are pretty much clustered together. Does it make sense to say that ireland was "dead last" and "we weren't even closer to the other countries" looking at this graph? I don't think we ever were more than a week or so behind the other countries.

The only real outlines there are Iceland/Malta (as they got supply outside of the EU) and the UK for obvious reasons.

The vaccination program has been a success in Ireland as it has been in all those other countries too. Could it have been better? Guess so, but definitely not in a drastic manner.

EDIT: link to the graph because the image quality on boards is BAD: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-vaccination-doses-per-capita?country=FRA~DEU~GBR~ESP~PRT~IRL~AUT~DNK~European+Union~BEL~NLD~CHE~SWE~NOR~LUX~ISL~MLT

bennyineire

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117832404#Comment_117832404

When you use the log scale it's more clearer, Ireland bunched in the middle and indeed better than average. robinbird will still give out about it somehow,

Lumen

@astrofool wrote:

The only issue in the system was the HSE IT hack and blackout that caused reporting to be delayed.

We always got 95% of vaccines into arms within a week when we were supply constrained and we ramped up vaccinations to match the supply we got.

To say otherwise, doesn't match the data and is disingenuous.

Can you explain why the ECDC vaccine currently reports for Ireland:

Total doses distributed to country: 8,156,770

Total dose administered: 6,799,125

Proportion of vaccines administered: 83.40%

Where have the 1,357,645 distributed but unadministered vaccines gone?

Source: https://vaccinetracker.ecdc.europa.eu/public/extensions/COVID-19/vaccine-tracker.html#distribution-tab

Stark

We got a big shipment from Romania fairly recently which skews things if you're going to cherry pick a single data point. Also we're running into vaccine hesitancy now so not as much demand for vaccines. Add to that we're no longer administering AstraZeneca so that's about 300,000 which will sit unused until they're donated to some other country. If you look at the Pfizer supplies, we have 5.6m delivered, 4.8m administered so when you take into account Romanian vaccines windfall, we're doing pretty well.

Lumen

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117833314#Comment_117833314

I'm not cherry picking, I only have one cherry!. I can't find the historical data in the vaccine portal so I only have the latest to go on.

If you can find the historical delivered vs administered stats I'll happily chart them up.

deeperlearning

Ourworldindata stats have been unreliable. For some countries, it has been rubbish-in rubbish-out.

seamus

Fun fact I learned last night which I cannot find any conflicting evidence for today;

In the history of vaccination, there has never been a single vaccine where new side effects have emerged more than two months post-vaccination.

So while there may be a glimmer of rationality in, "I want to wait and see how this pans out" in the vaccine-hesitant, we are now adequately far along that we know exactly what the long-term effects of this vaccine are. It is no longer a reasonable excuse for being hesitant.